A personal view on statistics in earth sciences

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The first sub-sampling paper: It was a long way

Over the spring a new paper has finally made it and is now published in full form in GRL: Our first sub-sampling paper. I will not go into too much detail on what the paper is about, as I will have plenty to explain on it when my other papers on this topic will come out. Rather I would like to talk a bit about the long path papers sometimes have to go and late addition of new coauthors (like me in this case).

So the paper was ready to submit when I started my time here in this group in Hamburg. I started to work on related topics, but for this paper I was originally too late. The paper went through the first and second review and was rejected. That was the point when I got involved, basically to assist in making the manuscript statistically waterproof. This was roughly at a time when I was one year here in hamburg. We have tested what ever could be tested. We learned a lot, which will form part of more papers on this topic by me and others in the future. But finally we have submitted it again and to our surprise, again the paper was rejected. We tried more and more ideas, how to make it even more accessible. The final try was then a success, which was roughly three years after I started.

It is quite common that in the race for good papers, reviews need a lot of time. Sometimes just a few months, sometimes years. Nevertheless, I am personally very happy to be part of this paper, because it opens the door for a new approach in forecasting weather/climate in long and short-term prediction in many different applications. Some of them will come by myself so I adapt my papers to match the helpful criticisms given in the reviews, and then we will again go down the long hard path through review.